The LIGO observatory has announced a second detection of gravitational waves. These waves were also produced by a pair of merging black holes and were detected in December, 2015. The black holes that produced this event were smaller than the ones that produced the first gravitational waves detected, massing approximately 8 and 14 solar masses. The newly formed black hole was 21 solar masses with about a solar mass converted into energy, largely as gravitational waves.

So it looks like the upgraded laser interferometers that LIGO is using are a success and black hole mergers are a reasonably common event in our universe.

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Flesh and blood of a dead star, slain in the apocalypse of supernova, resurrected by four billion years of continuous autocatalytic reaction and crowned with the emergent property of sentience in the dream that the universe might one day understand itself.

nope. in a nutshell, they can detect these waves now that occur when large masses change direction. Unlike light waves or xrays, these gravitational waves cruise along right through everything, which means they are unperturbed as they travel through spacetime. No matter how far they travel, the information will not be corrupted or bent by passing by stars, as it does with light waves and the like.

(16-06-2016 09:46 PM)skyking Wrote: nope. in a nutshell, they can detect these waves now that occur when large masses change direction. Unlike light waves or xrays, these gravitational waves cruise along right through everything, which means they are unperturbed as they travel through spacetime. No matter how far they travel, the information will not be corrupted or bent by passing by stars, as it does with light waves and the like.

It's good to be unperturbed when you travel.

Insufferable know-it-all. God has a plan for us. Please stop screwing it up with your prayers.

As a sci-fi fanatic, reading voraciously growing up, I came across a book in high school that remains one of my favorites of all time, The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. In it, the ships travel by "jumping" from singularities to singularities, while traveling at 99.9% of C. The singularities are actually fairly common in deep space, so by charting them and flying exactly in the path from one to another, the book proposed, a ship could "jump" to a distant part of the galaxy where it intercepted the other singularity. The trip to the distant jump-point, though, had to be undertaken at Einstinian velocities, and resulted in time dilation for the soldiers and crew aboard the ships. You could return from a two-year mission to find that 40 years had gone by on earth. Thus the title.

I also enjoyed the Honor Harrington series of books by David Weber, in which they use gravitational distortion to accelerate the ships at hundreds of g without squashing the crew, and detect other ships using this technology via gravitational waves.

We have sensed, with our crude early-21st-century equipment, the first gravity waves. We know they're no longer sci-fi or mathematical probability. Who knows what we'll be able to do with this information in the next 200+ years of better electronics and sensors?

The geek in me rejoices!

"Theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not really privy to the thoughts of God?" - E. O. Wilson